Balance and perspective.

I've been writing a lot lately about the new Nikon V1 camera and it's three popular lenses.  And, of course some will think that this requires me to pledge lifelong loyalty to this system and this brand.  So I thought I'd step back and shoot with a totally different camera today.  I chose the  Canon 1DS mk2 and the manual focus, 35mm Zeiss f2 ZE lens from the Canon drawer.  I got a late start out of the house today because Belinda and I were making some last minute proofing corrections to the LED book which is about to go to the printer. (Yah!!!).  It was 4:30 or so when I left the FedEx office.

I'm such a creature of habit.  I walked the same route I do most weekends.  I like it because this part of town is in constant flux.  The mid point of my out and back route is Medici Cafe which, incidentally, has the best coffee in town.  The beginning and ending point is the Whole Foods headquarters store.  And today I was on a mission to buy a bottle of our favorite Sherry on the way home.

When I shoot with the Nikon V1 I tend to let the camera do a lot of the work.  It's like a squirrel on amphetamines.  Fast to focus.  Fast to review. Fast to go again.  The Canon is different.  I shoot nearly wide open with the 35mm and I try hard to get the focus right.  I also depend more on manual metering with the spot meter.  I think a bit about exposure compensation and I shoot for tonality and range.  Not pop and sharp.

The late November light was beautiful from 4:30 till about 5:30 this afternoon.  Not too contrasty but not flat.  The clouds seemed more resolved and inherently dramatic than usual.  I'd gotten a brief tutorial on B&W in the RAW converter in Lightroom, from Will so I made a few conversions of the files I'd shot just to see what it was all about.  Kudos to Will.  I like the black and white function there.

After weeks of using the Nikon V1 as my primary street shooting camera it felt strange to haul around a camera that weighs five times as much with a lens that weighs at least ten times as much as it's smaller counterpart.  And it took a while to reconfigure my mind to the single focal length lens in an angle of view that seems wide to me.  But after a while I found my cadence and started to enjoy either getting closer or including more.

It's obviously getting darker earlier and the light is so different from the harsh, Summer light.  I was delighted to be outside just when the ambient light started to match interior lighting and I kept walking and looking for interesting stuff to wrap the light around.

After the balance changes and the city lights beat the sky light it's time to head back home.  After a stop for the best cappuccino in Austin.  The secret, I think, is not to fear whole milk.  It adds the perfect taste and consistency to the mix.  If you are going to have a cappuccino made with skim milk you might as well save your money and just drink your coffee black......

This is my favorite image from today's walk because of the sky.  The sun's been down for about 30 minutes here but there's this delicious afterglow that makes it all work for me.  

I'd come to believe that the fabulous VR of the V1 system was the vital component in me getting good, sharp shots from that camera but I found that I'm okay at hand holding some stuff right on down to 1/15th with the big Canon.  And even though it is hardly state of the art at higher ISO's I think it still does a great job right up to ISO 1600.  While preserving good color saturation.

At the end of my walk I ran into a fellow photographer friend, named, Todd.  He's a good photographer and a great teacher.  He was sitting with a friend and during the course of our quick, catch up conversation mentioned my penchant for changing camera systems more often than some people change their underwear (unfair!!!).  I rebutted as follows:  If you had an decent food budget would you eat the same meal at the same restaurant, night after night?  I know I wouldn't.  I'd get tired of even the finest ribeye eventually and want some Chinese food or some pizza.  Hell, maybe even a hamburger....

Same thing with cameras.  Some days I want something light and refreshing.  Other days I want something filling and substantial.  I shot with the V1 yesterday and the 1Ds 2 today.  Yin and Yang.  Foil versus sabre.

The important thing was to get out and taste the light.  Breathe the air.  Move through time and space.  And feel the flow of late afternoon.  The camera was just a motivator.  

"Do it right." A re-post by request. Thank you, Dave. Initially posted 11.01.10

Do the little things right and you'll do pretty well.

I like this image because it was lit so simply that I'm still amazed by it.  These two people were in an office and I'm shooting thru a doorway.  I've placed a Canon 508 EX2 with a radio trigger on a desk behind then facing the wall behind them.  The entire room is lit by that one light bouncing off the back wall and lighting them from the back and going around them and hitting the wall in front of them and then bouncing back into their faces.  Amazing to me.

I've been interviewing photographers who have been in the business for decades.  The successful ones do the details very, very well.  Let me circle back to that but first let me define what I mean by successful.  I'm thinking entirely from a business point of view.  So successful would mean that in good times and especially in bad times the doors stay open, customers call and share work, and all the bills get paid.  Now, a year like 2009 tests everyone but even in those dire circumstances there were a number of photographers who put their shoulders into it and pushed harder.  They were working with the same clay as everyone else but they focused on doing it better and more often.  

When I say, "better"  I am in no way talking about the quality of the work.  I'm talking about their unyielding resolve to keep up the advertising, the marketing, the blogging and whatever else they did to keep things moving forward.   And to a person they made it through not because of one or two very high budget, glamorous advertising projects but by doing the daily work that keeps clients happy.  And rather than see that "daily work" as beneath them, or remedial they approached the small jobs with the same professionalism as the bigger jobs that came their way in previous years.  Because, at the core, they realize that these jobs were just as important to their clients as the big ones.

They took the time to write a "thank you" note for any job they were asked to shoot.  They worked just as hard on the their post production.  They reached out and connected with their clients.  What I'm hearing now from these photographers is that all of their clients are coming back to full life.  Bids are being requested.  Contracts are being written and assignment work is back in style.  And, to a person, the clients have come back to these photographers and rewarded them for working the details. 

As I reflect on these interviews I've given some thought to my own business.  While I've had some big, fun, high profile jobs over the years the "bread and butter" jobs are the foundation of the business.  I've had one client at Motorola (now at Freescale) who's used my services for over twenty years.  None of the projects were the type that would get me on the cover of Adweek but all of them were challenging and fun to execute.  And the loyalty of my client translated into good income.  In return I would do whatever it takes to make this client satisfied with my work.

In all the years we've worked together I've never missed a deadline.  Never arrived late.  Never forgotten a critical detail.  After a few years my client stopped getting competitive bids.  She just calls on the phone with the details secure in the knowledge that there will be no surprises on her bill.  No complaints from her team.  And she's never forgotten to submit my invoice to accounting or recommend me to her peers.

Much of the marketing that photographers did in years past was aimed at getting the "big job".  Now the big jobs have become more scarce and the smaller and medium sized jobs are what photographers are looking for.  If they're smart.  Stringing a number of smaller jobs together can make an imaging business profitable and it's a way of not having all of your eggs in one basket.

I did this image for the same Annual Report as the image above.  These are the smaller "profile" images that accompany the bigger double truck spreads.  But the fact that they'll run smaller doesn't make them any less important to the client.  In this image I balanced the color of the small flash in an umbrella with the florescent lights in the rest of the facility.  I put a 1/2 plus green filter on the flash and it matched the overall light color pretty well.  I used the smaller flash because my intention was to match the overall light levels and provide clean fill.  It's not a difficult shot but it does take time to do it right.


So, besides doing the thank you notes and showing up on time and taking the work seriously, what are the little things and how do you keep track of them?

1.  You should have a job envelope for every project you do.  In it should be a copy of the job brief telling you what the client wants and what sort of details will be involved.  It should also contain the signed letter of agreement or contract.  During the job all invoices, parking fees, and client notes should go in there.  Clients hate it when little stuff falls thru the cracks.

2.  Pre-production is the foundation of all successful jobs.  Map out the job and make lists.  What kind of equipment will be required?  What kind of models?  Wardrobe?  Makeup?  Even what kind of snacks and refreshments.  Make maps to every location.  Put together a crew list with everyone's phone #'s.

3.  You need a packing list.  You might as well make a big list and have it copied.  Then, at the start of each job you can look through the list to jog your memory and make sure you're not forgetting a vital part.  What good is a softbox without a speedring?  A camera without a battery, etc.  The most forgotten item around here seems to be model releases and pens.  That's near the top of the new list around here.  The car is part of my production system so gas for the car is also on the list.....

4.  Make sure your client gets the files they want.  Every clients seems a bit different.  Some want big Tiff files while many who work mostly on the web are looking for Jpeg files.  A few even like working with RAW or .PSD files (whether you let RAWs out to your clients is a personal decision.  I have a few clients who are PhotoShop experts.  I'll give them the raw stuff.)  Give them what they need.  Give them what they want.  If they are web designers you aren't doing them or (by extension) yourself any favors giving them 120 megabyte uncompressed Tiff files.

5.  Make the process smooth. If you can knock some rough edges off that's a good thing.  Might mean bringing extra pens and pads for the forgetful or making sure the coffee addicts have access to the right brew.  Might mean finding the right restaurant for foodies.  Just don't leave anything to chance if you can help it.  We probably won't find "just the right chair" at the location.....

6.  The follow up.  After you deliver the files you need to follow up and make sure everything works and the designers are happy with both the files and the images.  Then you need to follow up and make sure you haven't messed up anything on the invoicing.  And finally, you should make a note to follow up and see how the photo worked in the ad or on the web.  The more interested you are in their work the more interested they will be in your work!

7.  The "thank you."  Without them you will not make money.  Clients need to know that you appreciate being invited to the party.  If your mom and dad never made you write "thank you" notes for gifts you got  from relatives and friends then you need to work that out with your therapist.  But you should make thanking your business partners = your clients mandatory when they give you the opportunity to show off how good you can be while giving you money in the process.  I've never met a client who didn't appreciate an honest expression of gratitude from an important vendor.....

8.  The "non-creepy" check in.  You want to stay connected to your client and you want your client connected to you.  Between jobs it's important to keep in touch.  But not in a creepy, "Hey, it's Bob.  Do you have any work for me???"  sort of way.  How do you do it?  If you've worked with a client on a project you'll probably have chatted about fun stuff like favorite TV shows, favorite music, favorite foods and what not during the course of their project.  A quick link to something you know they'll be interested in is nice.  A "no sales" lunch at a favorite lunch haunt is always welcome.  Just keep the selling to a minimum.  If you have some new work to show send them a taste in the form of a post card.

Finally, make sure there are no loose ends from a job.  If you promised a print or a file, jump on it right away.  If you make your jobs smooth and pretty much carefree for your clients you'll be invited back to the party again and again.  We all like working with people who make our lives easier.  And we've all dumped vendors who gave us confusing bills,  showed up late or acted gruff and surly.  Don't get dumped for forgetting the little stuff.

How do you know when you have a style?

I showed this image a couple of weeks ago but it kept calling out and begging me to make it black and white.  That's part of my style.

One of the questions I always had, as a struggling, beginning photographer was, "How do you create your own style?"  And no matter which grizzled, old photographer I asked the answer was always the same...

"Just shoot what you love the way you love to shoot it and you'll eventually have a style."  Being in a smaller market, in many ways, made the process a lot longer for me.  With a smaller market we always felt as though we needed to be prepared to shoot anything that came along and we generally reflected that in our portfolios.  I spent the first ten years of my career locked in a conflict which was basically a schism between:  "I'd love to have a personal style that people reconize."  And, "I need to be able to show proficiency in everything from commercial portraits to large format product shots if I'm going to make enough money to survive.."

But all through this time of indecision and ambiguity in my commercial work I was shooting portraits of friends.  I didn't consciously think of this work as "building a style."  That was something I thought I should be doing in my "paid" work.  Because I compartmentalized it this way I didn't approach my personal work with any sort of intention or grand plan.  I just shot what I liked, when I liked and with whatever camera I happened to have at hand.  There was no goal other than to make images that pleased me.  

When I went into the studio and worked on trying to build a style in my commercial work it always came out in one of two ways:  A train wreck.  Or, A dweeby copy of someone else's interpretation of whatever subject I was photographing.  While I usually, through entropy or laziness, light all my personal portraits with one big soft light when I walked into the studio and started shooting work for corporate clients it all seemed to match the stuff I saw in the portrait "how to" books of the time. I worked hard to emulate the styles of the "real pros."   Or it would be like the work I'd see in photo magazines because they always told you how to do it and even showed you were to put the lights, with little diagrams and behind the scenes shots.......

Honestly,  I despaired of ever having my own style, much less having anyone recognize that I was even close to establishing a unique way of looking at stuff.  And I more or less stopped caring about it.  But every week or even every day I'd find some gloriously hot, or quietly sophisticated beauty that I'd finagle into the studio to photograph.

One day I made this image:

The model was my assistant, Anne.  I was playing around with my usual "lazy man's lighting" scheme which meant:  Big, big softbox to one side.  Just inches from the camera and as close as I could get it to the subject.  And I put a few lights on the background.  It was an image I was making just because I wanted to see how much I could fine tune the lighting I usually used to make portraits of my own friends.  It was nothing I would really do for a client.  Anyway, we spent an hour and three or four rolls of medium format film and we came up with this.

I made a print because I liked the quiet and calm look of the image.  I made the print the way I made all my personal prints.  I let the shadows go deep black because my wife, the graphic designer, liked the way that looked in my images (helped along by using very little fill light...).  I stuck the resulting print up over my desk in my east Austin studio so I could study it.  It was so different from the overly lit images I thought the market demanded (a cautionary tale from those who would learn from the "experts" on the web and in books.  Sometimes the "education" we're getting in print and online is more of a history lesson.....).  I'd been churning out the standard three light portraits for years.  One main light.  One fill light, two stops down from the main light.  One background light.  The crappiest portraits were the ones in which I used four lights....adding one in as a back light.  It never looked right and I never liked the look.  In my portraits or anyone elses.

Anyway, a friend came over to shoot a small product oriented catalog and she remarked about how much she loved the image of Anne.  She asked if I had any more images in that style and I brought out an 11x14 inch print box with hundreds of prints of friends, acquaintances and random strangers whom I had asked in to the studio to sit for me, just for fun.  

My friend almost came unglued.  

"Why aren't you showing these to clients?"  She demanded.  "This is a wonderful style.  This is your style.  This is what you should be showing."  Now I'm older and I always want to be right.  But back then I was smart enough or flexible enough to take advice so I put together a whole series of portfolios that were mostly these black and white images I'd been making.  And the amazing thing was that it didn't matter what kind of camera or what format I'd made them in, when I started printing them and sticking them in the portfolios they started looking more and more uniform.

I showed these books exclusively for the next few years, always adding new and interesting work.  And a funny thing happened:  People started asking for work "in my style."  At first I had to ask them what they meant and they'd say:  "You know. That classical black and white stuff where everyone looks quiet and calm.  With the soft light and the nice shadows."  And it because a reinforcing cycle.  A circular process of paring images down to my barest and laziest lighting.

And now, when I show portfolios, or even when I write things here on the blog people refer to my style.  And they tell me that they can see the same style no matter what camera I use to shoot the images with.  The Nikon images look different but the same as the Olympus Pen images which look different but the same as the old Hasselblad images...

And I realize now how automatic it's become.  And how much I hate my own portraits when the shadows are over filled.  Or when there are gratuitous lights.  Or when I ask my subjects to do silly and unnatural things.  

My realization was the my style had to sneak up on me from behind and ambush me.  Because the harder I looked for it and the more hypervigilant I became in my search the further the style would recede from me.  I was doing it all along but I wasn't able to recognize it.  I thought of myself as a failure of a commercial photographer until I replaced what I "thought I should be doing" with what I thought was wonderful to me.  

And when I embraced my style people became much more interested in hiring me and using me.  People even volunteered to model for me.  And it was totally different than the stuff I was putting in my earlier promotional work because I realized that the only thing I could be good at, at all, was the stuff I was doing just for myself.  

Here are a few things I've found that kill a personal style:

1.  Embracing formulas from magazines, web sites and famous photographers.  You might be able to learn something by copying technique but it only helps your  style if you are finally able to discard the styles you've aped that come along with the techniques.

2.  If I spend time looking at everyone else's work and comparing mine to it then I diminish my confidence in my own vision and start, subconsciously, to give power to other people's vision and try to "absorb" some of their magic.  Always to my long term detriment.

3.  I think subject matter is vital.  I am only interested in faces and people.  I'll shoot urban landscapes when nobody is around to play with but I really only show people and I really only want to shoot people.  That's what's right for me.  And I think the further you distill your selection of subject matter the more and more fluid and conversant you become in photographing it.  To go from still life to food to landscapes to street photography to fashion to portraits is a sure recipe to never become truly conversant in any of it.  In the beginning we shoot everything because we are so in love with the process and in how things looked once they've been squeezed through a lens and reconstructed from electrons or silver grains.  It's like going from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to Snoop Doggy Dog to Madonna in the space of five minutes.  A jarring experience.  But while you might learn that you love the craftwork it's not a way to learn a focused style.

4.  Nothing destroys style quicker than well meaning "experts."  My funny story about this all has to do with detail in shadows.  Everything I read, from Ansel Adams to Pop Photo emphasized that a good print (image) has detail in the brightest highlights and in the deepest shadows.  When I would show my neophyte prints to established pros in Austin the standard critique started with the assertion that I needed to add a fill light to my portraits so we could see detail in the shadow areas.  The mark of a "professional" image.  But interestingly, the graphic designers at the hippest (and most successful) agencies as well as the art directors for magazines like Texas Monthly and Elle told me exactly the opposite!!!!  One of the things they all liked was the "rich, black shadows."  They thought it added a "wonderful contrast" to the prints.  My lesson?  Experts=status quo.

5.  Finally, the most common way to kill style is entropy and laziness.  Art ain't for the complacent.  I'm lucky.  Even though I may not have the native talent of someone like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn or Josef Koudelka,  I am interested enough and motivated enough to practice on a regular basis.  I kid that when I finish with a big photo assignment I like to relax with a little......photography.  If you ask my friends they'll confirm that I take a camera with me everywhere.....and use it.  The people who don't evolve a style are the ones who do too much brain work and too little camera work.  All the theory in the world is meaningless in developing rapport, empathy, excitement and a comfort in moving through a shoot.

I firmly believe that the evolution of a style comes from making the journey and it's all part of the same happy process.  When I shoot portraits for myself I enjoy the process entirely.  I love looking at the clothes the person brings to the studio.  I love setting up the lights and I love to watch the play of light across my friends' faces.  I love coaxing just the right expression from them and we share in the joy of reviewing the images.  If someone gave me a magic machine that I could use to automatically do all this and just get the same results I'd smash the machine and sell the scrap.  The process of having fun is also part of the process of building a style.

While I believe that purely technical workshops can be a benefit I advise everyone who asks to just take the same amount of money, read the instructions and then set off on their own adventure.  The iterative nature of the craft should soon make it invisible and automatic which frees you up to see.  And when you have automatic craft and clear seeing.....well......then you have a fighting chance of developing a look and style.

There's just one more thing that will kill a style.  The relentless pursuit of a style.....

Happy Thanksgiving.

This is my Dad.  He's in his mid-eighties and he's doing very well.  He still walks two miles most days, reads the New York Times and stays current.  He and my mom are coming to my house for Thanksgiving today.  So are Belinda's parents. And I'm thankful to have them. When I sat down to write this I thought about all the things I'm thankful for.  All the cool photo gear I get to play with.  My friends on the Masters Swim team.  My (nearly) perfect child.  I'm thankful to live in a hip and prosperous city full of interesting people.  I'm thankful that I can write even faster than I can think (and you can see how that would be problematic....).  I'm thankful that I've traveled enough to know how good I've got things right here in the vast and verdant Visual Science Lab compound and bunker facility here on the edge of west Austin....nestled in the gentle arms of the Texas Hill Country.  I'm thankful to my friends who stand by me when I'm serious and when I'm goofy.  I'm thankful that I don't have to chose between camera formats;  I can have them all.  I'm thankful to the Sullivan's who own our local camera store, Precision Camera.  They've bailed me out of several big life challenges with grace and amazing compassion.  And they are wonderful "partners" in my business.

I'm Thankful to all the people I have coffee with on a regular basis.  Primitive rites of sharing are fun and valuable.... Of course, I'm thankful for good coffee.

I'm thankful to the readers of the VSL blog who wade patiently and with forbearance through all the extraneous crap to read the few nuggets of value.  And especially to the ones who take time to write nice comments without little fish hooks of snark attached.

And, I'm thankful I was able to finish the five mile fun run today without the need for bottled oxygen or defibrillator paddles.

But most of all I'm thankful to have such a wonderful partner in Belinda.

I hope you take time to think of all the happiness and wonder in your lives. Happy Thanksgiving.

Kirk

Turn around and look in the opposite direction. Life is 360.

We were shooting some lifestyle ads for one of Austin's luxury, high rise condominium projects when I stepped away from the camera to give my eyes and my brain a break.  We were shooting an aspirational ad with an "upscale, west Austin, soccer mom" (model) in her early 30's with a glass of wine in a "fabulous" kitchen, somewhere on the fifth floor.  All the appliances were Miele or nicer.  The wine chiller?  Sub-Zero.  The countertops?  Italian marble.  My attention span? Minimal.  When I stepped away from the camera the highly (over)attentive make-up person rushed in to touch up the model.  When my assistants saw me walk out onto the adjacent patio the smart one walked over to check the camera and the memory card, made sure the tether connection was still good and made eye contact with me to make sure there was nothing I wanted at the moment.  The other assistant grabbed at her cellphone like it was a life raft in the north Atlantic and instantly started texting.....

When I walked out onto the patio I noticed this red chair against the blue sky and the low, rushing clouds.  I walked back in and grabbed another camera out of my bag and snapped a few images.  A retouched version (remove plywood to the right of the chair) ended up in the property brochure.  I stood by the railing and watched the traffic below. 

A famous photographer wrote a series of tips in a 1952 Modern Photography Magazine that I came across in the Fine Arts Library at UT many years later.  His advice?  "Once you've covered what you think is your subject, turn around and look in the opposite direction.  You might find something fun there."  "Always shoot a version for yourself instead of just what the job calls for."  "Only eat steak when the client is paying for dinner."  "Don't let them rush you.  It takes as long as it takes to do it right." "How much light do you need?  Just enough to do it right.  Not a bit more."  And finally, "Tell them it has to be real champagne in the glass because the photo will show the difference...."  I guess the last tip was intended to keep the photo shoots fun.

The only tip I can offer is to make sure to prop the kitchen and dining rooms shots with stuff you and the crew will enjoy eating....  And that red chairs look cool against blue skies.

Practice. Play. Practice. Play.

Anybody who says they get their photographs just right every time they pick up their camera is lying.  I practice my craft as often as possible and nearly every time I photograph there are lots of things I wish I'd done better.  I wish my lighting always looked just right but it doesn't.  I wish I'd nailed the exposure in a different way.  I'm generally convinced that I stopped shooting just seconds before the best frame was about to transpire and I still feel, after 20 years of PhotoShop, that I'm just picking my way on an unmarked path thru post processing.

Poor Ben.  He's up early for cross country and he works hard at school.  Like most teenagers he's looking forward to a little break when he gets home from school.  Maybe a little couch time with a video game, his dog and a snack.  But it doesn't always work that way.  Sometimes when he gets home he gets pulled into the studio to sit in for a "test."  A test generally means one of two things.  Either I have a big shoot coming up and want to rehearse my stuff or I got some new gear and I need a victim to try it out on.  Sometimes it's a mix.

The portrait above wasn't lit right but it was important to me to try out the lighting and see what the result looked like on the same film I was considering shooting for a job.  By doing the test I understood that I wanted a softer main light, a lot less fill and a lower midrange value for my upcoming project.  And I wanted a different film.

While many believe you can save just about anything in post production I can't help but think that you can make images even better if you stick good stuff into PhotoShop to start with.  Silly?  Maybe.  But it's habit.

Fuji Neopan 400 (Switched to Tri-X for the job; liked the grain better....),  Camera: Rollei 6008i,  Lens: 150mm.  Lighting:  28 inch beauty dish on a Profoto Acute B head.

Just because this image wasn't perfect doesn't mean I consider it to be a total loss. As an 8x8 inch print one of the grandparents will love it.......and then ask my why it isn't in color...

Practice. Play. Practice. Play.

Anybody who says they get their photographs just right every time they pick up their camera is lying.  I practice my craft as often as possible and nearly every time I photograph there are lots of things I wish I'd done better.  I wish my lighting always looked just right but it doesn't.  I wish I'd nailed the exposure in a different way.  I'm generally convinced that I stopped shooting just seconds before the best frame was about to transpire and I still feel, after 20 years of PhotoShop, that I'm just picking my way on an unmarked path thru post processing.

Poor Ben.  He's up early for cross country and he works hard at school.  Like most teenagers he's looking forward to a little break when he gets home from school.  Maybe a little couch time with a video game, his dog and a snack.  But it doesn't always work that way.  Sometimes when he gets home he gets pulled into the studio to sit in for a "test."  A test generally means one of two things.  Either I have a big shoot coming up and want to rehearse my stuff or I got some new gear and I need a victim to try it out on.

Late afternoon and into the evening with two good friends and a Nikon V1.

My friends, Andy and Frank are photographers.  They are as interested in the art and craft as I am and they are quiet and fun to spend time with.  We decided to meet downtown at Medici Cafe late this afternoon and go for a walk, have a little dinner and spend some time playing with our "miniature" cameras.  I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to see how my new little Nikon handled low light so I stuck the 10mm to 30mm kit lens on the front, crammed the 10mm into my shirt pocket and ventured into the land of "no parking."

I thought I'd be early but the guys were already there.  They were both in an Olympus micro mood today.  Andy was sporting an EPL1 with a Panasonic 20mm and Frank brought along his EP3 and switched between his new 12mm and his 45mm 1.8.  No tripods.  No flashes.  No other stuff.

We headed for South Congress Avenue and we were reveling in the sweet light that skims across the lake just before sunset.  On the Congress Ave. bridge we met this "Occupy Austin" protester waving a flag and waving at cars.  He said he wanted to get away from the city hall crowd and do his own thing so....there he was.  We approached and asked if he would mind us photographing him.  He didn't mind in the least.

 As far as I can tell the Nikon focuses quickly and accurately. One thing I've noticed is that I like to dial down the exposure by one third to two thirds of a stop under the indicated values in order to get files I like.  In post processing I always add a little bit more black with a the black slider in Lightroom.  And I am likely to use the "punch" preset with some of the files as well.  It imparts a fun grittiness to the images.

When we first started out there was a strong wind and low clouds whipped through the late autumn sun like a slow motion movie effect.  

 Everywhere we turned in downtown the light and cloud mix created little dramas on the faces of the buildings.  We were shooting and walking.  Shooting and walking.  Pretty soon we got our cadence down and  were able to walk in some sort of coherent pattern.  I'd been looking forward to our walk because Andy has a style that is untainted by previous exposure to the traditions of heavy, film based photography.  He's a natural with the LCD screen on the back and consistently tells me not to depend on the viewfinder but to "use the force."  I wanted to open myself up to new ways of photographing and looking and so I was purposely studying his approach.  Using the live view on the back screen he would maintain a loose and fluid methodology, making little adjustments with his feet or the bend of his knees.  The live view allowed him to make almost unconscious corrections to exposure and shoot quickly.  I tried to follow his lead and not be as rigid as I know I am.  Too many rules in my brain.  Reminds me of my favorite bumper sticker about dogs:  "More wag, bark less."

 Another odd thing about this evening.  Usually when I'm in a crowd of photographers I'm the odd man out, shooting with a bag of single focal length lenses.  This evening I was the odd man out for shooting with the only zoom in the trio.  The 45mm 1.8 on the Pen EP3 is a wonderful combination....Must.....resist......buying.....temptation....

When I got back home I downloaded my files and started to edit them.  I saw several things.  The Nikon was a bit too warm in many of the downtown building files.  It may be that it was really accurate to the way the scene was being lit, a low, late sun is very warm.  But the scenes all looked better as I made the color bluer in my raw conversions.

The second thing I noticed is that the Nikon has a very fine, black pepper grain to images shot over 640 ISO.  It's not apparent until I zoom into 100% but it's there.  There is none of the chromatic noise that causes the color sparkles in older camera images.  And, even though this very sharp and monochromatic noise sneaks in it doesn't seem to affect the sharpness of the files.  I'll stand by my original observations and say that you are good using ISO's up to 800 without much restriction (DON'T underexpose) and, with care, at 1600.  3200 is reportage with the intention to convert to black and white.  Even the files at 250 ISO have a little bit of this black pepper noise but it's not at all intrusive and doesn't seem to effect the image at reasonable print sizes.

Shooting in a group, no matter how small, always entails a bit of compromise but tonight was smooth.  One of us would linger behind to explore a reflection or something in a shop window and would catch up.  One person would find an interesting subject and go off on a tangent.  And we'd all come back together again, minutes later and compare notes.  I like to see how people photograph.  We're all so different.  Since we weren't lighting or directing each shot came and went quickly.

This is a close up of the forearm of the protester on the bridge.  That is not a temporary tattoo.  It's the real deal.  Still fresh and red around the edges.  He had other interesting tattoos as well.  If you want to shoot something specific sometimes you just have to ask.....

As we headed south on the bridge I turned around to snap a few images of the downtown skyline.  Austin has changed so much in the last five years.  Our downtown has been totally revitalized and is now the interesting place to be.  Many of the new skyscrapers are resident towers and I look forward to a time when we have a real, 24/7 downtown to move through.  The one thing we lack right now is a good number of 24 hour restaurants....

As we worked our way toward the food trailers I found myself falling into the familiar pattern of looking for familiar patterns.  The Nikon EVF is a perfectly suited for the process of grabbing graphic nibblets.  You see, essentially, the finished photo as you are previsualizing it and visualizing it on the screen.  It's kind of like seeing the future and the present simultaneously.

But I have to consistently practice my people engagement skills even if I flub the technical stuff.  The camera might be up for 1/8th second exposures but I'm not sure I am and I'm pretty sure this couple was moving a bit as well.  (Lit with very, very low incandescent lighting coming through a shop window.)

I photographed this flower/vase because I liked the combination of textures but when I developed the image in Lightroom I liked it more as an example of the graceful highlight transitions I could see in the different tones on the white ceramic.

The combination of streetlights and the afterglow of sunset makes for wonderful color contrasts.  I wish the skies would hang there, in this balance, for hours everyday.  As it is you have only glancing opportunities to catch a perfect balance and then it's gone.  Makes for a bit of a challenge.

I can't speak for the other guys but for me this was a welcome photographic vacation from my long day of photography related stuff in the studio.  One of the banes of modern commercial photography is the long hours spent in front of a monitor doing things like, clipping paths, black and white conversions and fine tuning large files destined for print.  I spent hours this morning taking 40 megapixel raw files, converting them into beautiful color files, making masks to drop out backgrounds while leaving wisps of hair intact and then uploading nearly a gigabyte of files to my client's FTP server.  Once you add in following up on some billing and putting together a few bids you find that you've spent the bulk of the day in a chair at a desk.  Which is decidedly not what I really signed up for in the beginning of this whole photography lifestyle thing.  But it's cathartic to get out as the light changes and the wind changes and walk down a busy street with the wonderful feel of a camera in your hand.  And even if you come back without any images you want to show to anyone else you know you've spent time well.  

I must confess that the photo above and the photo below were intentionally shot into light sources to see if the Nikon could be coaxed into showing off "red dot syndrome."   I think the camera passed this test well but I offer no guarantees for people who want to include the sun in their frames.  I do love the mix of street lights and ropes of bulbs against an evening sky.

We stopped at the end of our route and ate a jovial dinner at a fish taco restaurant.  We talked about cameras and we talked about life, and our plans for the holidays.  It was a simple moment but one without a care in the world.  And that's a rare thing to be able to say these days.  Our intention from the beginning was to walk.  Everything else would be whipped creme on top of the sundae.

This shop on south Congress Ave. had a display of old cameras.  35mm and other odd formats from the 1940's and 1950's.  The coolest thing I saw in the shop was this giant camera.  Every once in a while the flash bulb would light up.  The rubber ducks were a nice counterpoint.......

We wound up back where we started and we sat at the bar and watched people and talked to each other, and to the baristas.  In one of those, "Only in Austin" moments we were informed that salsa dance classes would be starting, in the coffee shop, in "just a few minutes."  When we left the salsa was already in progress and Austinites in black t-shirts with band logos on the front were dipping and dancing with women in skirts.  We each shook hands and headed off to find our cars and return to our homes.  I felt like a tourist in my own town.  And it was good.  There are always more attractions to see.  And the price is just right.

Funny to write about my adventures with the little Nikon.  Yesterday I was shooting portraits on black and white film with my Hasselblad and the 150mm lens.  The day before I was shooting still life with the Canon 1DS mk2 and a 90mm macro lens.  I guess I'm just destined to shoot "all over the map." But it sure keeps my job AND my hobby fresh.  

By the way, our protester with the "Occupy Austin" tattoo also sported this one.  I was thinking of getting one like this myself.  But my friends convinced me I should get a Leica tattoo instead.  I'm still pondering.   :- )

Final report on the Nikon:  I like it.  It's sharp.  It's no more or less infallible then any other comparable camera.  It does nice detail and has good color.  It's fast.  It's light and small and I can carry it all evening without a thought.  In all I think Nikon should do well with the new format.  It might not be the camera for you but.......it's not a bad camera.

Talented Reader Spot Light. Tripod Strap.

I'm so over black.  And I'm tired of synthetic everything.  I guess you can see that when you see the tripod I use for my work.  It's one of my two Berlebach tripods, handmade in Germany from aged Maple.  I take my tripod everywhere and consider it VR/IS on steroids.  Recently a VSL reader named Gordy, noticed my affection for old tech stabilization and wrote to ask me if I'd like a tripod strap to go with it.  I accepted.

I'd never really carried a tripod with a strap before but I thought I'd give it a try.  I like it a lot.  It's snug on my shoulder and frees up my right hand, which used to bear the burden of the tripod as I tromped along to a job site.  But most of all, I like the aesthetics.  The leather is thick and gives the impression that it'll supply years of service.  I carry it so the tripod hangs horizontally.

In the interests of total disclosure I must say that Gordy sent me the strap as a gift.  He did not ask me to write this but I wanted to after having used the strap for a week.  It's a niche product that feels both retro and useful.  I'm putting the link to Gordy's strap site in case you want a non-traditional (or should I say previously traditional?) camera or tripod strap.

Gordy is smart.  He hooked me by sending the first one for free.  Now I've been back to the site several times and I'm in the process of deciding which straps I need for a few new cameras.  I just can't stand the promotional straps that come in the boxes with the new cameras.......

http://www.gordyscamerastraps.com/index.htm

Talented Reader Spot Light. Tripod Strap.

I'm so over black.  And I'm tired of synthetic everything.  I guess you can see that when you see the tripod I use for my work.  It's one of two Berlebach tripods, handmade in Germany from aged Maple.  I take my tripod everywhere and consider it VR/IS on steroids.  Recently a VSL reader named, Gordy, noticed my affection for old tech stabilization and wrote to ask me if I'd like a tripod strap to go with it.  I accepted.

I'd never really carried a tripod with a strap before but I thought I'd give it a try.  I like it a lot.  It's snug on my shoulder and frees up my right hand, which used to bear the burden of the tripod as I tromped along to a job site.  But most of all, I like the aesthetics.  The leather is thick and gives the impression that it'll supply years of service.

In the interests of total disclosure I must say that Gordy sent me the strap as a gift.  He did not ask me to write this but I wanted to after having used the strap for a week.  It's a niche product that feels both retro and useful.  I'm putting the link to Gordy's strap site in case you want a non-traditional (or should I say previously traditional?) camera or tripod strap.

Gordy is smart.  He hooked me by sending the first one for free.  Now I've been back to the site several times and I'm in the process of deciding which straps I need for a few new cameras.  I just can't stand the promotional straps that come in the boxes with the new cameras.......

Ginger Rogers had to do everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in heels.....

I laugh and shake my head when I hear about photographers who can't function without "fast" autofocus, total exposure automation and instant chimp-o-metric confirmation at all times.  It's painful to hear about professionals who can't cope with composition if they don't have a zoom lens on the front of their camera. I laugh derisively at people who think modern day "flash-ists"  invented basic techniques like balancing flash with ambient exposure or using back light.  And I especially "thumb my nose" at photographers who feel the need to travel with a big, pouty, noisy entourage.  Who the hell needs all those people around them these days?

I'm shooting some people in my studio tomorrow and I generally use that as an excuse to do some major cleaning up.  I've wiped away the stacks of stands and piles of power packs that were brought home and tossed into the corner after last week's long flurry of location photography.  I was going through a filing cabinet drawing, tossing out mementos of yesteryear in order to make room for future junk when I came across a contact sheet and a page of negatives.  Big, juicy, medium format color negatives.  ISO 100 Fuji Reala negatives, to be exact.  I remembered this shoot with my assistant, Anne.  We were setting up to do shots of Dell executives in various locations around their beautiful executive briefing center.

So I thought I'd pop a negative in the desktop scanner and see what it all looked like back then.  This was old school photography all the way.  Our assignment was to find five or six fun locations and then guide our executive thru each location in order to build a catalog of public relations shots the company could use for the next two years.  Anne was standing in for a test shot.  She's holding our medium format camera with a Polaroid test back on it.

Anne and I met at the studio in the dark part of the morning  to pack and get on the road to Round Rock.  That's where Dell's main offices are.  We carried along a Bronica SQai System which was a fun and inexpensive (by comparative standards) knock off of the venerable Hasselblad 500 series.  The system entailed three bodies,  waist level finders and hoods,  lenses from 50mm to 200mm, and eight 120 film backs.  We also carried a Polaroid back and a couple boxes of 100 ISO speed, black and white test film.  We used black and white for several reasons:  1.  It was a better match, tonally and exposure wise with the Fuji Reala film than was the color-roid.  2.  It was quicker to process.  Ready in 30 seconds under most temperatures.  3. It didn't generate discussions with clients about color.  Many a working photographer will tell you stories of hours spent fine tuning the color on the Polaroid tests they were shooting, in order to please the client, only to have the color be nowhere close on the film.  We pretty much knew what we were doing back then with light meters and such so the color part of the Polaroid wasn't very necessary.  Why open up a big can of worms if you don't need to?

We packed three or four Profoto monolights, with (OMG) optical slaves, and an equal number of stands and reflectors.  We also packed large and small soft boxes, some flags to flag off spill and a bunch of odds and ends.  In fact, we took everything we thought we might need if it would fit on our cart.  And a lot of stuff did.

Our basic modus operandi was to walk through the entire location first and make little sketches in a notebook about which sites and which angles we thought would work best.  Then we returned to site one and started setting up.  First thing is to find your angle and establish the subject/background relationship you want.  More important than anything else.  Once we had the lens, distance from camera to subject and subject to background figured out we'd start to light.  My first step is to light the background or, in the case of the image above, to see how we'd use the cool light already existing in the scene.  I metered the background and established a base exposure for that.  From memory I'd say we were looking at f8 at around 1/15th of a second with the ISO 100 film.  Next step is to figure out how to light the subject.  We went with a small (32 inch) umbrella with a black backing used to right of our subject.  A white reflector, used close in, provides fill from the other side.  Our final light is a small flash ( probably a Metz ) dialed way down and used on a stand right behind Anne's head.  Only when we had moved all of the lighting components into place and had metered them with an incident light meter did we pop our first Polaroid.  Why not pop one at every step?  Easy, they cost about $2.50 each to shoot at the time and I'd rather do the technical stuff with a bit a of rigor and pocket the money we'd waste on iterative and unnecessary tests.

At this point we'd bring the client into the mix (they generally sat in one of the conference rooms during our quick set ups and caught up on work...), snap one more Polaroid and then work through two whole rolls of film.  A whopping 24 frames.  Sometimes, when we were running low on film we'd call it a wrap in twelve shots.  Confidence in your own technique was a requirement back then.  There weren't many other alternatives.

Once we got what we needed we'd talk to the client about how long it would take to do the next set up and where we would rendezvous.  Then Anne and I would label the film from the location, bag it with the relevant polaroids and move on.  At the end of the shoot we'd divide the film up into two batches.  One roll from each set up.  Then we'd have the lab run one batch, and then the other.  This was like cheap insurance that let us know we'd know that, even in the face of abject lab failure, we'd have one roll of images to fall back on.  For the most part the labs never failed (except on one of my biggest assignments on 4x5 sheet film for IBM.....but that's another story...).

The role of the assistant on shoots like this was more involved than it is today.  They'd be responsible for labeling and keeping track of the film.  They'd pack it, load it, unload it, label it, bag it and keep track of it at all times.  We trusted our meters back then and the assistant had a meter as well as the photographer.  I could stand at camera position, pop a light, and depend on my assist to meter the pop from the right position, holding the meter in the right spot and then jotting down the readings in a little notebook in case we changed cameras and lenses and needed to go back to our reference exposure.

On shoots where we shot lots of images loading film backs on demand, always correctly, was a skill in demand.  When we got back home we'd unpack and the assistant would take the two batches of film to the lab and give them any necessary instructions.

I use assistants far less often for interior shoots these days.  And usually it's in the capacity of setting up and tearing down lights.  There's very little else productive for them to do while we're shooting.  My current assistant sometimes operates more as a producer, lining up models, getting props and figuring out logistics.  As we relentlessly downsize both the type and quantity of gear (and the budgets) the rationale for using assistants on a frequent basis also shrinks.  On outdoor shoots you need a good assistant (if you are lighting) to keep the light stands up in the wind and to carry the sandbags to the location from the car.  It's also good to have an extra set of eyes on the gear when out with the public....

Well, that's all I really had to say.  I was just struck, when I saw these photos, with the memory of how much work and skill it used to take to do a shoot versus what is required now.  I recently did a hospital shoot and mostly used a Canon 5Dmk2.  Our most rigorous lighting challenges were easily handled by a clean ISO 800 or 1600 and a little foundational supplementation with a small, TTL cabled flash.  Our value add had nothing to do with technical stuff and everything to do with directing and building quick and effective rapport.  That and seeing the right angles, composition and gesture.

When people talk about the challenges of photography today, as they relate to technique, I just roll my eyes and think of the quote about Ginger Rogers.  That's probably why so many older photographers are a bit resentful about having learned so much good stuff in their careers. Stuff that is being tossed by the wayside.  We'd like to be able to show off just how elegantly we could dance backwards with a view camera......